


and my eyes will see light again

by eudaimon



Category: 13th Warrior (1999)
Genre: Dreams, Established Relationship, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 14:00:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/pseuds/eudaimon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Long years have passed in piece before he sends it - not quite a call to arms.  A message.  A gift.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and my eyes will see light again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mlyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mlyn/gifts).



> Merry Christmas! I couldn't resist a slight element of "American Gods" creeping into this. Ihope that that's okay ♥

Long years in peace have passed by the time he sends it, no perfumed messenger boy but his own son, fourteen summers tall, golden haired by his father but comely by his mother, clever and quick and brave, best of all, most of all (and that by his mother, too). His oldest son, the best of him, so nobody else could carry this message tucked between shirt and skin.

Six words. Six words where, once, there was thirteen brothers in arms. Six words, simple. Six words, far from that.

_A new world is waiting, brother._

And it's three months before his son rides home again, tall and unfamiliar on a strange white horse. It seems like he has grown feet since he was last at his father's fireside. He tells stories of green mountains and bottomless valleys. He has tales of riding flat out across endless miles of rippling white sand with a message tucked between shirt and skin.

The white horse is named for the wind.

_Will he come?_ he asks, but his son just holds out the letter in a windburned hand and then goes looking for kisses and hot oatcakes from his mother. Herger has never read the words as well as he speaks them but, slowly, he makes do.

Six words. Six, and then a fluid sort of line which is not Latin, not any Latin which he has ever seen. He supposes that it is one of the magic words that a people like the Arabs must surely have for themselves.

_I will come when I can_.

A truth: once touched by death, a man will always long for it, be it his own or someone else's.

*

This time, Ahmed dons old, solid clothes, clothes which Herger buttons for him and smoothes against his chest. His wife learned a long time ago to keep one ye blind. He touches Ahmed's face, traces new lines and old scards. Long years of peace between them, and a man's face makes a map of everywhere he's been. Herger tries to find his way through the years on Ahmed's face but he has never been a navigator. Stars are just stars.

In the end, he pulls him close and kisses him.

What they have ahead of them is long journeying. They will huddle together in the narrow boats, backs to the boards, faces to the myriad stars. They'll freeze and shudder and Ahmed will turn that particular shade of green for the second time in their acquaintance.

Arabs were not made for seafaring.

They will drink mead until there's nothing left but the soft green water and that will be when the praying time begins. They carry their gods with them. It's always been their way. Crows in cages mean Odin is with them. Huddled in the dark on the deck, and the sea, the great rushing ocean will mat together beards and hair and fur. It will be many months, maybe, lying and feeding and singing in the narrow boat like babes in the womb, pissing over the side. And will they call for him in the dark like he was not always with them. Like they do not carry him where they go so that he will go there with him, strangers in a strange green land.

For now, though, they are warm and dry, and they must count their blessings. He frames Ahmed's face with both hands and kisses him deeply. He has always imagined that Arabs were hewn of finer things than his own people; they are alabaster and inlaid marble, whereas his people were made from clay and the bones of giants. He traces the familiar lines of Ahmed's face with his thumbs.

_Is this why you bought me here?_ he asks.

Herger begins to grin.

_It is one of the reasons_, he says.

The bed is wide and stacked with furs against the chill that lingers in the Spring. Spring is the moving season, and there is wandering in his bones. It was Autumn when they first met, he remembers, when the mists came rolling down through the hills. He begins to unfasten clothes that he has only just fastened. Ahmed ducks his head and smiles, his long fingers slipping beneath the collar of a linen shirt which is long worn and much mended.

They are neither of them as young as they once were.

He takes his time, his mouth lingering over unfamiliar marks and scars. Ahmed's skin is smooth as a boy's compared to his own. A warrior is never supposed to be old bones. Sometimes, he finds himself at the shore and he skims stones across the surf and he thinks of Buliwyf, and he still never knows if it was a curse or a blessing. They do not burn the bodies anymore; they bury them beneath wooden crosses. Some keep to the old ways. Hard to raise a sword, clogged in earth. Shameful to arrive in Valhalla with earth clinging in your hair. He bends his head, the tangled ringlets of his hair brushing against Ahmed's nut-brown belly. He kisses, one two three for the old gods, one two three for the new.

There is nobody that Herger has ever known as well as he knows Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan. He lay awake in the dark listening to him breathe. He watched him fight. He watched the realisation dawn: that even he could die.

They could have all died but, in the end, only some of them did (and, among them, the best of them, the very best) and it doesn't take so long to remember how to touch each other like they used to. He does his wife the service of remaining quiet, which is easy to do when he'd rather kiss deeply and whisper softly. _I missed you_, he tells him. _I love you. I remember you well._

Afterwards, they lie together, sweaty and content and the hair curls at Ahmed's temples and it's easy to drift, with a warm body in his arms, a familiar weight, a map. The furs piled high on the bed. The distant, smoky smell of the fire.

He sleeps, and he opens his eyes and Ahmed is still sleeping in the long grass. In the way of dreams, he knows that he is dreaming. He recognises that none of this is real and it is given that this green field in which they lay sleeping until just now is a part of a far distant, greener land.

He has a feeling of being watched and he turns his head and there she is, crouching in the long grass and the swaying seed-heads. It seems to him that she looks very like the girl from years ago, the one who took Ahmed by the hand and led him into the dim shadows.

Or maybe all of the young girls recall all of the young girls who came before them? Maybe the dead are starting to come back to him in the eyes of his children.

She tilts her head, bird-like, and he watches her. The early morning sun catches in her hair and makes a halo like the carpenter King wears. He turns his head and spits and makes the sign of the old gods against his palm.

When he looks back at her, she's laughing.

"Did you know," she says, "that there is water over most of the world, just as there is water in most of your body, little man? Water is thinner than blood and it covers the world, so ou're not so very different from plants, in the end."  
"No?" he asks her and she shakes her head.

_No._

"Is this the New World, then?"  
"It is," she says. "But the sun rises in the east, just the same." She gets up and walks towards him and she stretches out her arms like wings and she dances to him, her skirt kilted around her thighs, her knees muddied. She reaches up and cradles his bearded cheeks with both hands.

"Tell me one thing, man of the North," she says, and he finds herself rapt, staring into eyes the colour of freshly budded leaves. "Will you come here safely?"

He turns his head and looks down at Ahmed sleeping in the grass and, somewhere, he's sleeping in a bed stacked high with furs.

"We mean to," he says, and he doesn't promise that he will do no harm because they were born with the fight in their blood, his people, and Ahmed too learned how to hold a sword.

The way that she smiles, he doesn't think that her heart lies with the new world, anyway.  
There were old ways, and they have started to die away now, but they will never be forgotten. When he was a little boy, he said Thor's day prayers and prayers to the god of the Gallows, to the All-Father, but, in the morning time, with his mother, he had always prayed to the Dawn.

"The All-Father may have woven the skein of your life, sweet man, but it is I who bless you." She grazed her mouth against his and he tastes the sweet, green taste of her against the somehow smokier taste that Ahmed left behind.

"I bless you both," she tells him, covering his eyes with one hand to close them. "Keep growing. More life."

When he opens his eyes again, he's back in the bed and Ahmed has rolled away from him. He reaches out and trails one hand against the unbroken skin of his back. As he drifts to sleep, he finds a prayer in his heart.

_Sun, hail to you! Shining in darkness, far-famed goddess and fair. Holy come you. Holy ride down to the dark._

In the morning, the wind and the tide will be perfect for voyaging, and it will be time to go again.

He feels the thrill in brain and heart and cock as he thinks of it.  
Away again. On again. Outside, it's full dark but he can feel the dawn like a promise. A new world, and the sun will still rise in the east.


End file.
